If you’re a smartwatch fanatic, you might know that Pebble recently introduced its upgraded watch offerings and announced a new tiny pocket computer or ultra-wearable called the Core. Well, in an official blogpost today, the company has announced that it is adding Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition to the Core.
The Core is a 3G enabled fitness tracker powered by Android and having a tiny 25MB memory to process commands and store data. With Amazon’s acclaimed voice service Alexa as its core(see what i did there!?), the tiny fitness tracker will be armed with an arsenal of voice-activated capabilities.
And Pebble is not shying away from mentioning the fact that Core will be the first fully-independent 3G wearable device to make use of Alexa’s voice recognition services. The Kickstarter campaign backers will be the first ones to get a taste of how well the voice integration works, when the watches and wearable keychain starts shipping early next year.
Eric Migicovsky, the CEO of Pebble expresses his joy in adding the services of Amazon’s Alexa to the Core and says that,
Experiencing Amazon Alexa on-the-go right from Pebble Core is game-changing for wearable technology. We’re longtime fans of the powerful voice services Alexa delivers, and it only gets smarter and more useful over time. It’s an approach we embrace with our own products.
Selecting from a wide range of commands, the users will be able to play their favorite songs, and playlists directly from Amazon Prime, iHeartRadio and many other music services. It will also read out headlines, review your health summary, order pizzas on the fly, shop gifts(from Amazon ofcourse!), get you latest weather and traffic updates, control your smart home appliances or tell you a joke if you’re feeling low or alone.
With the integration of Alexa into Pebble Core, the company wants to make developers aware of the openness of Pebble ecosystem. It wants to nudge the developers to start hacking and build stuff atop the already robust Pebble platform.
Also, we’re sad to see that Alexa will only be coming to the Core while the smartwatches just sit and stare at the wow-factor it adds to the beautiful fitness tracker. Pebble fanboys have already lined-up to buy the latest offerings and the KickStarter campaign has now garnered the smartwatch maker a sum total of nearly $10 million USD.
Here’s a sneak peak into how Alexa will work on the Pebble Core:
